Archive for the ‘Favorite Dana Quotes’ Category

Looking back through our archive of Donella Meadows’s writing, it’s not hard to find examples of thanks. Dana was thankful for the community and environment around her, sentiments which are echoed over and over in her letters and columns.
In November 1994, Dana wrote, “On a farm I can really put my heart into a festival of harvest and thanksgiving. I [...]

The following piece was written by Donella Meadows and published December 29, 1988. Twenty-four years later, her simple, practical suggestions for what we as individuals can do to contribute to the health of our planet still ring true. The year 2012 was marked as a year of unprecedented environmental disasters, but we can all work to make 2013 the year [...]

Donella Meadows enjoyed many of the same things during the holidays that so many of us look forward to–time with family and loved ones, good music and good company, giving and sharing, warmth and light. As she wrote to her friends in December 1996, “I’m looking forward to it, the slowdown, the quietness. I light white candles and play beautiful [...]

By Sarah Parkinson

Donella Meadows’s writing showed that the American election system is far from perfect, but the privilege of voting is still too important to pass up.
Today, Americans vote to decide the next President in the White House. The voting system is imperfect, but our participation is important. (Image credit: MCS@flickr)
Voting, democracy, elections, and campaign reform were all common themes in Donella [...]

“Speak the truth.
Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently,
and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power.
Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence.
All growth is not good.
The environment is a necessity, not a luxury.
There is such a thing as enough.”

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Quotations

About DMI

Since its founding in 1996 by environmental leader Donella Meadows, our Institute has been at the forefront of sustainability thinking and training. Our initiatives have addressed economic, environmental, and social challenges from a range of angles and at many levels. In everything we do, the disciplines of systems thinking and organizational learning inform and shape our work. It is this focus on whole-system analysis, combined with careful listening, truth telling, and visioning, that make the Donella Meadows Institute unique among sustainability organizations. Read More

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